Blending
by Saesama
Summary: Their appearance in the new timeline had unforeseen consequences, because there can only ever be one of anything that matters. And gods matter. Kid Guardian-centric AU.


Your fist is bleeding when you pull it out of the wall, sluggish scarlet dripping down between your knuckles. You ignore the pain, thumping your fist futilely against the broken wall before turning to slide to the floor. Your arms drape over your knees and you stare at the ceiling and try and figure out who you are.

It's hard being two people at once. It's hard and seven other people understand. You don't know how it happened, or why it happened. Most of the corpses, you could account for, but you don't know why your Bro and Roxy's mom were buried under Roxy's house. You don't know why Jade had the ashes of both Jake's gramma and Jane's poppop in her living room. You don't know why this stupid fucking universal fuckery decided that the rule of 'there can only be one' applied to people as well as jujus and that corpses counted.

Sometimes, you're Dirk Strider, thirty-four year old Internet superstar and all around obstinate jackass. And sometimes you're Dirk Strider, sixteen year old introvert and all around manipulative prick. And sometimes, the competing memories make you want to rip out your hair and scream.

"Sup."

You open your eyes. Dave is standing in front of you, casual and slouching and even his shades can't hide the bags under his eyes or the strain in his face. The Striders and Lalondes all died young, making their averAges somewhere in their twenties, compared to the nearly-forties of your dark-haired friends, and the man in front of you isn't one that either version of you explicitly recognizes. But it's him, it's Dave, and you're torn again. Pride on one side, because fuck what anyone else thinks, you've always been proud of Dave, proud of the child you raised. On the other side is the desperate hero worship of a boy looking back through the years at the man he wants to be. You waver between the two extremes and decide to settle on the only shade both emotions have in common, that of slightly disconnected affection.

"Hey," you respond, corner of your mouth tweaking slightly.

He slides down the wall opposite of you, four too-long legs tangling obnoxiously in the center of the narrow hallway in a barrier of denim. You tip your head back against the wall and stare at Dave from behind your shades. He's staring back, you're fairly certain, though anyone looking at the two of you will assume you're both staring ironically at the ceiling.

"Fuck," he mutters after a long moment, and you allow your head to incline a fraction of an inch. He smiles, wry and pained. "This sucks, bro," he says.

You bark a laugh. 'Sucks' doesn't begin to describe this shit. Hookers suck. Dysons suck. Losing at Mario Kart sucks. This is misery like nothing you've ever known, and your emotions decide to hit the roller-coaster again. You want to protect him and ask him for protection, you want to cry on him and yell at him to man up, you want to be his Bro, you want him to be yours, you want-

A brother.

The thought hits you like a fist. You're not his guardian any more, and he's not yours, but the conflicting urges are still there; to protect him, to look to him for guidance, to fight for him and with him and against him and have his back because he has yours. You're equals now, for the first time in either version of your lives, and he's not your Bro anymore. He's your brother.

You hold out your closed fist towards him. "One step at a time, brother," you say, not putting any deliberate emphasis on the word. He notices anyway, looks at you for a long moment, then returns the fist bump.

"One step at a time," he agrees softly.

O o o

The meteor was destroyed, hitting Prospit's moon hard enough to snap the chain and both went hurtling into the Veil in flaming chunks. But the golden ship still flew, carving a graceful path through the Incipisphere, all of the meteor inhabitants safely relocated before the impact. Below you is LOCAH, dancing its new double orbit with LOWAS, two sapphire worlds tracing an azure double helix around the no-longer barren Skaia.

He sits next to you, silent and thoughtful. The Blending affects all of you, and you envy Roxy and Dirk a little. Thirty would be so much easier to reconcile with sixteen than sixty. You're handling it well enough, you suppose. Unlike the others, your combined memories aren't set off by the sight of John. You never directly knew each other, Nannasprite aside. No envy for that, certainly. Dirk is cracking, Roxy is crumbling, and you haven't seen Jake in three days.

John is tumbling a breeze between his fingers, weaving dust and motes in the air. His face, familiar and not, is almost relaxed as he shapes elaborate mandalas, Skaian gates and Egyptian glyphs in the space between his hands. He fashions a cats cradle with a smile almost wistful, and you can't help touching his elbow. He drops the breeze, startled, and you smile you calm him. "You know how to play?" you ask.

He goes wistful again. "My dad taught me," he replies. He shifts, blinks, his smile faltering. "And I taught him, when he was my son," he says softly, brows knitting.

"They're not the same man," you say dubiously. "Even discounting genetics."

"Yeah, but," He rubs the back of his neck. "I can see the boy I raised becoming the man that raised me. God, that makes no sense."

"You're expecting complex metaphysics to make sense," you point out.

He makes a face, silly and annoyed. "Sh'yeah, right. My bad." You laugh, he sighs and looks at his hands between his knees. "Has he- will he always love baking so much?"

You're not sure which version he's talking about. You suppose it doesn't matter. "All that I've known him," you say. "His hobby."

He makes another face, gentler. "As a kid, I thought he was a menace. As an adult, I'm not sure my opinion changed much."

You laugh. James Elias Egbert is not Jared Edward Crocker, but the similarities are distressing, closer than even the similarities between your disparate selves, or between the funnyman John Crocker and the teenage god John Egbert. "I think," you say. "He's kind of a universal constant. I bet both versions of the troll world had a lupus that wore a fedora and cooked whatever it dragged home."

"Lusus," he corrects, laughing. "That's a nice thought. Did your son go through a phase where he spoke in a bad British accent for three weeks?"

"French," you grin. "Did Dad volunteer at the soup kitchen down town every other weekend?"

"Kids shelter," he replied.

"And he always wore the clown nose-"

"And the frilly apron."

You both start giggling, your teenage sides winning out but warring with paternal pride. Your son turned out all right, after all. And maybe your dad wasn't so bad. You lose track of time, discussing the Universal Constant with John, and maybe that's the trick to this Blending thing, is to focus of the similarities rather than the differences.

O o o

You walk into the room, and almost walk back out when you see Rose.

She's reading, barely glancing up at you when you pause by the door, and the sight of her unnerves you on multiple levels. The once-upon-a-writer-slash-freedom-fighter bothers you a bit, because, yeah, she was your hero growing up, and meeting your hero is always hard. But more, you're seeing your difficult, temperamental, passive-aggressive daughter for the first time in three years, and while Dr. Lalonde might be willing to put up with that shit, Ro-lal isn't and Roxy squared would rather borrow Janey's spoon-fork and jab it into her sinuses.

Plus, she's your clone, and though you can see Dirk in her focus and stoicism, the similarities between the two of you at a similar age are just creepy.

Maybe you're being unfair. Maybe she doesn't want to start the mind games again. But every interview with the author!Rose ended with the interviewer in tears, and every interaction with your daughter ended in either smug victory or exasperation, and there's no way that kind of relationship is healthy and you can't think of a single reason why either version of her would change her habits now.

You need a drink. John and Jake hid all of the alcohol from you, until you were more or less integrated into your new thought patterns. The others all agreed that using the booze to hide in wasn't going to help you at all, and you know what? To hell with all of them.

You're about to leave anyway when Rose shifts and looks up at you. You pause, politely giving her a minute to say whatever it is she wants to say, mentally preparing your vast repertoire of polite, snide comebacks, and you're shocked when she says "I read some of your writing."

You frown and look back at her. On one side of the Scratch, your writing is a set of carefully hidden novellas on your laptop that you never had the bravery to get published. On the other was fanfiction of your mom-daughter's books. "Which set?" you ask finally.

"Both," she answers. "I found, ah, Mom's writing right before everything happened, and saved it for later. I got Roxy's from Hal during a conversation we had. He assured me it was writing you had made public, but I only read a little bit of it."

You bristle, unable to help being offended by the implication that it wasn't worth reading. "Not professional enough?" you ask coldly, also apparently unable to help being a bitch.

Her eyes narrow. "Actually, I enjoyed both," she says, equally cool. She holds your eyes for a minute. "I just wanted your permission to read more." Another pause, and her voice softens, a little awkward and a little eager. "If you're willing, I'd like to discuss your theories on Zazzerpan and Theresideus' relationship. You hit surprisingly close to what I intended when I wrote it."

Or maybe your difficult daughter has grown up a little. Maybe the secretive, mysterious hero you worshiped really was human beneath her anti-social shell. Maybe she's as unnerved by you as you are her.

"Yeah," you surprise yourself by saying. "That sounds cool."

Maybe you both should give the other a chance.

O o o

LOFAF reminds you a bit of home. Thick foliage, rivers of obsidian and lava from the active volcano, breathtaking humidity. But it's a cold humidity, and the trees are too many pines and not enough ferns, and the opponent stalking you through the trees is finally playing at your level.

You step under a branch, dislodging a shower of dewy water, and she comes swinging down nearly on top of your head. You swear and roll, and the shot from her rifle bites into the trunk of a tree instead of your shoulder.

You swing both pistols up, catching her rifle in the cross, and fucking hell, you're dueling with guns as if they were blades. Your grandma would tan your hide for that kind of stunt and she just might, glaring at you over the butt of her rifle. "M'lady," you say politely, giving her a nod and a wicked grin.

"Good sir," she replies, baring canine fangs. She plants her foot in your gut and shoves.

You fall back but drop one pistol to grab her rifle and take it with you. She shrieks, girlish outrage, and you scramble around to kick your fallen pistol from her reach. Your duel becomes a slippery, deadly dance of wet pine needles and a skittering gun, unable to get a good draw on her with your remaining pistol and without time to spin her rifle around properly. She keeps you off balance, black hair like a banner as she ducks and dodges, and tries to get at the pistol on the ground.

She's beautiful. Not the elderly woman you idolized, nor the infant you doted on, but a woman in the prime of her life, wicked sharp and viper fast. Neither of you are using the powers the game has given you, only the skills you taught each other and honed alone. It's enough, it's more than enough, and your heart sings. There's no challenge in facing an enemy with a certain outcome, whether you're guaranteed to win or lose. This is anything but certain.

She gets the pistol, whips around and jams it under your chin. You shove the other one against her skull, each of you staring each other down with about half an ounce of pressure separating you both from becoming murderers.

Then Jade smiles, is your grandma, is your granddaughter, is the only person you have loved without reserve in both of your lives. You return the smile, brimming over with affection for this woman, and you both back away, thumbing safety's before trading weapons back. She runs a hand through her hair, looks at you. "We're still tied," she points out. "One more round to settle it?"

"One more," you agree, holstering your pistols. You really don't know why your friends are having trouble with the Blending. All of the important things are the same.


End file.
